MAI:COMPANY
Rockoko
In May 2025, choreographer Patricia Carolin Mai founded a company for people interested in dance and in the experience of community. This led to the creation of MAI:COMPANY, bringing together more than one hundred people of different ages, professions, life contexts, biographies, and interests. Since the beginning of the season, they have been meeting regularly to explore a shared question: What is my attitude toward my own body and toward the bodies of others? Where does this attitude come from, and how do I engage with it?
Together with Patricia Carolin Mai and her artistic team, they explore artistic practices that enable them to emancipate themselves from bodily norms, labels, and attributions. They question gestures, postures, and habits, and search for positions between resilience and protest. Their piece ROCKOKO is the outcome of this collective process: by putting on skirts, they celebrate the individuality of every body that exists beneath them.
When the idea for the piece first emerged a year ago, it was already clear that the members of the company would not only address but also negotiate forms of personally grounded resistance among themselves. What could not have been foreseen was the extent to which ROCKOKO would come into being at a time when political repression shapes and destroys people’s lives.
ROCKOKO is therefore dedicated to those who cannot gather on stage because their fundamental right to visibility and presence continues to be denied.
